Post-mortem from today’s FreeBSD/arm64 outage of my prod web-server:

After reboot, the box appeared to hang around ZFS root/init. Pools imported fine from live media, /sbin/init was valid, old kernel/BE made no difference. There was also a stale GPT signature on a whole-disk ZFS vdev, which made the trail extra noisy.

Actual RCA: a stray " in /etc/rc.conf in my static_routes line. rc.conf is shell, so that broke early boot badly enough that networking never came up and it looked like kernel/ZFS/init trouble.

Fixed syntax, restored ZFS canmount values, jails back online.

Lesson: always run sh -n /etc/rc.conf before rebooting. 🫠

#freebsd #outage #runbsd #oopsie